Bobby Valentine Believes He Could Have Managed Red Sox To World Series This Year

BOSTON (CBS) — The Bobby Valentine era in Boston was an absolute disaster. The man was more circus clown than manager during his brief tenure with the Red Sox, leading the team to its worst record since the 1960s and playing the main character in an embarrassing soap opera that was canceled after 10 months.

Yet the 63-year-old Valentine never has been lacking in delusional thoughts, and his latest fantasy nearly jumped off the page of Tuesday’s Boston Globe. Valentine praised the job that John Farrell, his replacement, has done in leading the Red Sox to the World Series. But Valentine also believes that given the same roster, he could have done the same job.

“I’d like to think,” Valentine told Nick Cafardo, “that if I came back for my second year that, given the changes and improvements, I would have been able to do the same thing.”

Oh boy.

What Valentine still fails to see is that he, more than anyone or anything else, was the problem with the 2012 Red Sox. He was a daily sideshow from day one, when he humbly bragged that people refer to him as a genius. He was the genius who wrote a lineup without knowing whether the opposing starting pitcher was a righty or a lefty (he guessed wrong). He was the genius who volunteered a story about Will Middlebrooks to the media, only to later accuse the media of fabricating that same story when it was being used against him. He was the genius who drove Kevin Youkilis out of town. He was the genius who accused David Ortiz, the face of the franchise, of quitting midseason.

He claimed on the day he was hired, “I’m not the genius that I’ve heard people refer to me as.” But he didn’t need to say those words. His incompetence would prove it all year long.

Now the athletic director of Sacred Heart University, Valentine told Cafardo that he’s rooting for the Red Sox despite his firing last October.

“I picked them to win the division, the ALDS, the ALCS, and now the World Series,” Valentine told Cafardo, in what is most likely another lie. “I’m rooting them on. The guys left on that team that I managed were all good guys. I enjoyed all of them, so why wouldn’t I root for them? … Those guys went through a lot of blood, sweat, and tears with me, and I with them, so I’m happy for them. I’m happy they could be part of a winning situation.”

He would like to think differently, but seemingly everybody on the planet aside from Valentine himself knows that a “winning situation” only became possible in Boston the day he was sent packing.